About Us

The contributors to the Consumer Law & Policy blog are lawyers and law professors who
practice, teach, or write about consumer law and policy. The blog is hosted by Public
Citizen Litigation Group, but the views expressed here are solely those of the individual contributors (and don't necessarily
reflect the views of institutions with which they are affiliated). To view the blog's policies, please click here.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

"The Irony of Privacy Class Action Litigation"

That's the title of a piece by Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law School. Here's the abstract:

In the
past few years, publicized privacy violations have regularly spawned
class action lawsuits in the United States, even when the company made a
good faith mistake and no victim suffered any quantifiable harm.
Privacy advocates often cheer these lawsuits because they generally
favor vigorous enforcement of privacy violations, but this essay
encourages privacy advocates to reconsider their support for privacy
class action litigation. By its nature, class action litigation uses
tactics that privacy advocates disavow. Thus, using class action
litigation to remediate privacy violations proves to be unintentionally
ironic.